This chapter notes the need to restore a sense of balance to Manchester's role in refugee history: to assess the degree to which the people and institutions of a supposedly liberal British city like Manchester actually reached beyond everyday concerns to help the victims of European Fascism find a haven of safety. It throws questions around the view of Manchester as a ‘liberal city’. It asks what it was about those who did reach out which caused them to do so; which differentiated them from an indifferent majority. In Holocaust history, the Manchester population might have been designated ‘bystanders’ to the unfolding tragedy wished by the Nazis upon those judged to have been unworthy of membership of the Third Reich.

In order to explore the relationship of women to the family estate, this chapter outlines provisions made for women in marriage settlements and last wills and testaments. In Ireland, as in England, the most important aspect of family property arrangements in this period was inheritance, the procedure by which both landed and moveable property is transmitted between generations. Women's ownership of property in the wealthy landed class was determined by settlements that made provision from the family estate. Such arrangements therefore provide a useful indication of property and power relations within families. Despite the evident desire to make adequate provision for family members, the primary concern in such arrangements was the protection of the family estate. Furthermore, methods used by landed families to make provision for women, as well as daughters and younger sons of a marriage, were characterised by the desire to consolidate the power of the husband or father over family landed property, while reinforcing his authority over family members.

This chapter explores the legal, familial and social factors that influenced women in Ireland in their experience of property in the period 1750–1850. The evidence is drawn from the personal and legal documents of twenty landed families, an approach which facilitated legitimate comparisons and made possible the use of a wider range of sources than a study that focused exclusively on landed records. The equivalent purchasing power of £10,000 in 1850 was £720,000 in 1998. These families were therefore among the wealthiest in Ireland, which restricted the field of research to those who were more likely to have shared financial backgrounds. The date range 1750–1850 was selected as, by the beginning of this period, methods of settling estates and of arranging pin money and jointure for women were in place in the wealthy landed class; after 1850, the impact of the Great Famine on landed estates changed the economic context within which landed families existed.

‘The Poverty of Theory’ is an unusual work in the Edward Palmer Thompson canon. Thompson's essay inspired furious debate in print, and in the freezing hall of St Paul's. Beyond the Frontier and Witness Against the Beast are very different from the more famous histories of the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the end of the 1970s, Thompson's work was united by a set of beliefs he had adopted during the ‘decade of heroes’ between 1936 and 1946. The general characteristics of Thompson's late period are then explored. Beyond the Frontier exemplifies the style and attitudes of the ‘late’ Thompson. The Sykaos Papers is a thoroughly chaotic work, in which attempts at satire and polemic are hamstrung by Thompson's collapsing faith in the international and transhistorical causes that once sustained him. Thompson uses the interview to reiterate some familiar themes of his ‘late’ work.

Conceptualizing and measuring choice is problematic both in theory and in practice. Measuring by counting the alternatives seems counterintuitive, as a smaller set of better or more diverse alternatives seems to provide more choice than one that is simply larger. However, concentrating upon better alternatives leads to choice being defined by welfare or utility, which is also counterintuitive. The chapter considers the implications of this paradox in relation to examples drawn from the choice agenda in British social policy. It examines the empirical difficulties in measuring welfare gains through implementing greater choice at a time of other central-led policy initiatives such as targets, and discusses the extant evidence. It suggests criteria for judging whether or not choice has been welfare-enhancing. It argues that ‘soft choice’, where service providers supply information and explain different options, is preferable to ‘hard’ choice involving simplistic targets to increase choice by box-ticking.

Democracy is seen to exert a globalizing force upon the international community; yet its most enthusiastic proponents argue that it must be a localized, grassroots phenomenon to be of any value. Modern democracy appeared originally within the context of a sovereign state system and required state autonomy in order to preserve democratic institutions. The increasing unwillingness to challenge normative claims made in the political arena, especially within disparate cultural contexts, was a disservice perpetuated by the discipline. The long-standing debate in international relations theory between 'realists' and 'idealists' filtered into the democratic transformation debate. The complexity of the debate was compounded insofar, as the objective commonly accepted by most participants in the debate was itself a manifestly normative construct. The current fascination of international relations theorists in the spread of democratic regimes seems to be more intensely fixed upon the relationship between democracy and peace than upon democracy and wealth.

Drawing on the work of Woudhuysen, Love, Marotti and others, shows how and why manuscripts, and their care, copying and collection, were so important to Renaissance culture. Illustrates these matters with quotations and anecdotes from writers of Burley’s period. Distinguishes this manuscript collection from other miscellanies by its size and variety. Proposes in later chapters to bring to light its vastness, complexity and undiscovered riches, and to show how its study may reward students of literature and social history.

This chapter discusses the role of married woman in the family property distribution and formal–informal powers available to elite woman. Under the English common law doctrine of coverture the legal identity of a married woman was merged with that of her husband. Husband and wife were one person in law, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not acquire, hold or alienate property, either real or chattel, or enter into contracts. Her husband acquired a freehold interest in her estates of inheritance and life interest. Money and personal chattels used by a woman during her marriage legally belonged to her husband. It was however possible to circumvent the legal disabilities inherent in coverture by the use of trusts in equity. Separate property arrangements could be made guaranteeing a married woman access to an income, independent of her husband. Such settlements were a common feature in Irish wealthy landed families, and provide another perspective on family property interests.

This chapter looks at many of the issues involved in theorizing civil society. A focus on 'civil society' has permitted institutions such as the World Bank to emphasize the principles as the accountability of the state to its citizens, and the desirability of due process and transparency in all government activity. Civil society was indistinguishable from political society because social life was by its very nature political. The chapter discusses a number of conceptual objections to the term. The current enthusiasm for 'civil society' both as an analytical device to understand why things happen and, more commonly, as an ideal model of political life, leaves much unsaid. The problem with 'civil society' as an analytical concept, or as even as a political ideal, is not that it is undertheorized, but that it is overtheorized.

Multiple local centres of power were reduced as the growing institutions of central government consolidated jurisdiction at the expense of provincial noble authority. The ways in which this long-term process of state-building in Ireland occurred were complex but a central role was played by print. The importance of print to government was made particularly clear in the 1640s. In the initial session of the parliament of 1640 the press was used by Lord Deputy Wentworth as a way of demonstrating control. As an institution, the established Church of Ireland also used print in the straightforward task of ensuring increasing administrative uniformity. From the institutional point of view, print made possible the extension of the central government's idea of a 'commonwealth' into the provincial world with very considerable social consequences.

This chapter reveals that the League's movement cultivated sizeable Anglican and Free Church followings in England and Wales, benefiting from but also contributing to the drive towards ecumenical co-operation after the war. It also shows that the League movement's message of Christian internationalism became a constitutive element of the public culture of religiosity. The greater affinity between the Free Churches and the League was the legacy of pre-war political nonconformity. The League of Nations Union (LNU) branches were more commonly met with a wall of silence when approaching local Roman Catholic churches. The Religions and Ethics Committee was never amongst the LNU's most active bodies. The LNU stood as testimony to the diversity of spiritual life in interwar Britain and the possibilities of ecumenical and inter-faith co-operation. Christianity was the national religious creed with which the vast majority of the population identified, including those who rarely, if ever, attended church.

This study of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) has challenged a number of assumptions regarding the force. Particularly, its Ulster Volunteer Force's (UVF) relationship with Ulster and British Unionist political leadership and the role of the force in serving as the basis for both the 36th (Ulster) Division and Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). At the top of the UVF's command structure was Sir Edward Carson, but it is evident that his views on the organisation had changed over time. The number of British army officers available to the UVF was therefore considerably less than the number available to any of the Kitchener armies raised in 1914. In the 1914-1915 period attempts were made to retain the UVF as a formed body. The Ulster Unionist leadership was conscious that Home Rule would be revisited at the end of the war and was reluctant to demilitarise their political army in this circumstance.

In taking responsibility for refugees from Czechoslovakia, the Quakers were brought into contact with political refugees, Communists and Social Democrats, brought to Britain by the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. Some of them were experienced members of the German KPD who, following the emergence of the Nazi regime, had taken refuge in Prague. Some had been sent on what turned out to be unproductive missions to Germany for just this purpose. Arriving in Britain in 1938, their political skills enabled them to re-group and to work for the rescue of their comrades still trapped in Czechoslovakia. One such group of KPD members, helped by the Quakers, found its way to Manchester, where it sought to provide their comrades with a means of escape. In doing so, they concealed their Communist identities in the hope of enlisting the support of the Quakers and of influential Manchester liberals.

Approximately one-third of the way through Abel Ferrara's 1993 film, Body Snatchers, army doctor Major Collins questions the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representative about the toxicity of chemicals stored on the military base. In Ferrara's adaptation, monstrous becomings have an erotic potential absent from earlier cinematic incarnations of Jack Finney's novel. Ferrara's revelation of the social and cultural logics is at work in US millennial culture. It is only fitting that the most pronounced moments of cinematic horror in Body Snatchers arise not from the fear of what one may become, but from the very act of becoming. In their increasingly spectacular representation of the narrative, social, familial and corporeal body in flux, Don Siegel, Philip Kaufman, and Ferrara's adaptations of Finney's The Body Snatchers engage historically-specific cultures in transition.

This chapter examines the climacteric in the Conservative Party's relationship with the extreme right after 1945, showing how Central Office dealt with the possible incursion of the external extreme right into the Conservative Party. Private Eye parodied Edward Heath as the managing director of ‘Heathco’. Heath's Government seemed incapable of enacting, or unwilling to enact, any remedy for society's ills. Its problems provided veterans of the extreme right with an opportunity to grab the limelight from the beginning. Jonathan Guinness, Richard Body and Tim Stroud contested the Monday Club's 1972 leadership election. It is possible that the Monday Club's resolution reflected the divisions within the Monday Club rather than any corporate move rightwards. Guinness's victory was the culmination of pressure applied by Monday Club members who opposed the extreme right and voted accordingly. The October 1974 General Election was a personal disaster for Edward Heath.